April 24, 7:45 WBAI 99.5 fm. A check on our progress as American Muslims; and, Lynne Stewart: the Peoples' Lawyer.

See Ramzy Baroud's assessment on how our Muslim community misuses celebrity Muslims as surrogates for their own stuggle.

Monday April 17 WBAI Radio, NYC. Why is there essential no anti-war movement in the USA?

April 10; A critical look at media coverage of the US assault on Syria; and an update on ReclaimNY.

B. Nimri Aziz weekly radio commentary on events around the globe and in the USA. Listen in at 99.5 fm, or online www.wbai.org where we are livestreamed.

"We are more alike than we are different"

Maya Angelou

March 8, Women's Day Radio Specials 10-11 am on WJFF Radio, 90.5 fm, and 11:am on WBAI, 99.5 New York: B. Nimri Aziz interviews director Amber Fares about her new film "Speed Sisters" and exerpts from 2009-2010 interviews with professional women in Syria, Nadia Khost and Nidaa Al-Islam.

As a Black writer, I was expected to accept the role of victim. That made it difficult in the beginning to be a writer. James Baldwin

I often feel that there must have been something that I should’ve done that I didn’t do. But I can’t identify what it is that I didn’t do. That’s the first difficulty. And the second is, what makes you think you’re it?

Harry Belafonte, activist and singer at 89

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; It's what you know for sure that just ainst so.

Mark Twain

You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.

Mary Tyler Moore

You can’t defend Christianity by being against refugees and other religions

Pope Francis:

"I don't have to be what you want me to be". Muhammad Ali

"The Secret of Living Well and Longer: eat half, walk double, laugh triple, and love without measure" attributed to Tibetan sources

Articles

Inevitably, a time
arrives in a people’s history when a shared awakening occurs. In varying
degrees of awareness, driven by the feeling that “It is up to me to tell my
people’s story,” we begin.Or, we arecompelled simply to tell my own story.

James Baldwin, when
he emerged as a political voice, concluded, that he could not accept what he
once believed --that he was an interloper, that he could have “no other
heritage (than the white heritage) which I could possibly hope to use”, and he
would simply have to accept his special attitude, his special place in the
world scheme. At one time, he had believed that otherwise, “I would have no
place in any scheme”. (Autobiographical Notes, p. 7, Notes of A Native Son, 1955.)

Ultimately Baldwin
rejected that fate and he went on to write some of the finest prose in American
literature. Today, just fifty years later he has earned a place as one of
America’s foremost writers.

There are many similarities between
Arab and Black experience in the United States, and Arabs in general would gain
much in our struggle for empowerment and recognition by studying our positions
vis-à-vis the mainstream White society more closely. This applies to artists as
well as community leaders.

Drawing from his analysis of his
heritage and how he might negotiate the world of the Black American and the
dominant White culture he found so oppressive, Baldwin said: “One writes out of
one thing only-- one’s own experience.” It is not easy when one finds oneself
embedded in a hostile environment that is also one’s beloved home. “Everything
depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop,
sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the
artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
(Autobiographical Notes, p. 7, Notes of A Native Son).

Facing the sweet and bitter, tussling
with disorder, hate, fear, is asserting our responsibility, a responsibility we
once had left to others.

“Write or be written” is one of the three guiding principles set out in
the mission statement of the Italian American Writers Association a decade ago.
“Write or be written.” It’s that simple. Black Americans learned this. Italian
Americans as well. Now, as demonstrated in the surge of new books by our
emerging writers, our Arab community has reached this conclusion.

“Write or be
written.” Because the histories we learn in school, the tales we hear in the
street, the claims made on our behalf, all somehow miss the point. Or simply
get it wrong. We are really not how others write us. At best we are invisible.
What we witnessed and were taught was not and is not our heritage.

We may wait a
generation to discover what we decide is an unbiased historian, or at least a
talented sympathizer Robert Fisk, Michael Moore, June Jordan, Noam Chomsky any
of the numerous informed and courageous experts who try to set the record
straight. Our story will finally find its way into the public arena, we
believe. So we champion these men and women, and circulate their stories.

Ultimately however,
we find that those accounts, when they appear, are never really satisfactory.
They may inform, but only in a qualified way. Something is missing. Even if we
do not say so, we feel it. What’s missing is ‘me’. Because those friendly
appeals can never embody the intimacies—bitter and sweet--of what only we know
is our life and that of our ancestors. They are never quite convincing, not to
us anyway. Ultimately, perhaps, as mere second hand attempts to reveal a
people’s soul, other well-meaning attempts serve little purpose towards the
goal to giving voice to the voiceless.

Writing one’s own story is not easy, as we are learning. When we take on
the responsibility of recording our story, we have first to master the
language. Yet, craft is not the foremost issue. Honesty and intimacy, often
accompanied by some pain, face us when we really examine our truths. Often
writers speak about this. The best overcome it.

Then there is the
wall to pull down. Given the heap of misrepresentations and the patronizing
tales of Arabs by generations of Orientalists, politicians and reporters, we
face a barrier of half-truths that we ourselves have imbibed and perhaps
believed. So we have a great deal of sorting out to do. We must decide what is
really true and what is false, then negotiate those and add to this our own
hidden experience.

Arab descendants in
America are, to a degree, colonized. Encouraged to forget our beautiful difference,
we imbibe so many of the biases and distortions around us. We become ambiguous
about our heritage. And a person who is equivocal or confused can never become
an artist. As Baldwin points, out the process of making order from chaos is
art.

When one rejects the falsehoods, a
void often opens before us. If I am not that alien, if not that exotic, if not
that mean and incompetent, that nostalgic or warring woman others write me,
what am I? Who was my sitti, my grandmother? What about her made her larger and
more real than an American granny. I need to find out and then imprint her
arabness on everyone.

At one point in poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s award winning story, Sitti’s Secret, the little girl is combing her grandmother’s freshly washed hair, an uneventful gesture in a series of
exchanges between the child and old woman. It was not so for me. I recognized
my Arab grandmother there. Only an Arab child could know this. How? Because my
grandmother too invited me to comb her hair after she had washed it. That
created a deeply intimate bond between my sitti and me. I never heard of anyone
else doing this. So when I read that passage in Nye’s story I was deeply moved,
in part because I felt my heritage was retrieved. Nye’s account gave me pride;
it did not take anything from my own grandmother and our secret. Rather, it
offered a means for me to share that special moment with all little girls in
the world. Perhaps other children comb their grandmothers’ hair. Because an
Arab woman, Naomi Shihab Nye was the first to articulate it for me, it has
greater poignancy. Art and not nostalgia made the leap.

Today’s
Arab writers have the job and the will to seek out these overlooked
minor details of our heritage and with them help us rebuild a
fragmented, uncertain, identity.

Toni Morrison writes about her
research for her stories thus: “I always think I am at some
archeological site and I find a shard, a little piece of pottery and
then I have to invent the rest. But first I have to go to the place,
move the dirt and find out why I am there.”

All writers are such miners,
sifting through the fragments, the little things overlooked or
abandoned or discolored by others. This is where Arab American writers
are today, first going to the place, and moving the dirt.

“They stole the little things from
us,” said the composer and singer Marcel Khalife about the losses in
his native Lebanon after Israel’s invasion. Historians, human rights
experts and politicians may quantify the gross violations of a ravaged
people--millions and millions driven from their homelands, denied
succor, leaving loved ones in terrifying circumstances. What makes one
story, although no less tragic, more poignant than another, lies
perhaps in the ‘little things’
we are able to identify and recover. What we build from them may not
overturn
centuries of injustice, and it will not propel us into a position of
dominance.
But we can at least write our own story. As for addressing what others
write,
perhaps as Baldwin concluded, “truce… is the best we can hope for.”

Many
committed Arab American personalities and experts have dedicated
themselves to challenging erroneous and dangerous stereotypes of Arabs.
These arguments may be useful in a court of law. They do not, however,
make novels. Writers cannot dispute. But we can locate ourselves at
that archeological site, and build new stories from the little things
we reclaim.

This is an exhilarating,
backbreaking, long process that distinguishes a writer from others. In
the new generation, it produced the memoir “Children of Roomje” by
Elmaz Abinader, Diana Abujaber’s first novel “Arabian Jazz”, and the
collection “Food For Our Grandmothers” edited by Joanna Kadi. These
ventures, all three from women in our Arab American community, were
early individual rivulets for what would become a virtual deluge of new
poetry, plays, novels and memoirs, all appearing in the past decade.

Why Arab women seem
to be in the forefront of this rush of writing ourselves, I am
uncertain. Possibly, we feel driven by the same spirit that led so many
Black women and Asian women and Italian women to search their lives, to
dig through the hoary gravesites, to imbue little things with real
importance.

Among Black Americans, while the
work of James Baldwin and Richard Wright are now classics of American
literature, today four African American women, Toni Morrison, Rita
Dove, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker are writers of tremendous talent
and accomplishment. Through her writing, each one has expanded the
boundaries of human experience. Doubtless, each in turn, urges other
women to search, confront, and then to write. From our Asian writers--
Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, Jampa Lahiri and Bharati Mukerjee
have likewise made a whole people visible and passionate.

Every generation of
writers who make a social and literary impact do so by leaping
barriers. Perhaps in the case of African Americans of the mid 20th th
Century, it was the confrontation on race that propelled the debate
into literature. While race is still a major theme in so much
contemporary writing by Black writers, Morrison’s work reaches into
spheres of human exchange that take the Black American experience and
every reader to new heights, accompanied by a completely distinctive
music in her language.

Can the writing of
Arabs in America do this? And will we build on foundations laid in English by
Khalil Gibran, Sam Hazo, or Gregory Orfalea, or in Arabic by Adonis, Nizar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish?

Or will we construct our truths on the wings of Americans like June Jordan, and Sonia Sanchez.

In her
poem, “first writing since” the incomparably forthright poet, Suheir
Hammad, records her news about the World Trade Center disaster of
September 11, 2001 with the words “please god, let it be a mistake…
please don’t let it be anyone who looks like my brother….”There
is surely not a single Arab or Muslim man or woman anywhere who,
sharing that awesome news, did not utter the same thought. Yet, we
needed this especially honest women, this young writer, Suheir Hammad,
to articulate
that simple fear. Her words reach all men and women, universally, who
at one
moment in time or another, have cried “Please god, not my brother.”

Hammad’s
work represents an important step away from nostalgia and towards a
face-to-face maturity of what it is to be Arab and American. The
protest novels of Black writers was critical to the emergence of the
Black literary voice of the 20th century. The anger of feminists linking the personal with the universal-- was also a stage in their emerging voice. And
Asian American writers like Jampa Lahiri articulate the delicate, tragic edge of their people’s existence in American society.

Thus far, for the
most part, Arab American writers, although we feel tormented and
confused,
whether by our ancestry or our tenuous place in American society or the
injustices in Palestine expose little of the real conflicts we face.
Our writers seem to be struggling to tolerate, to cleanse our image, to
move on. I doubt if we can really advance without openly confronting
the ills that afflict us, the barriers that confront us, internal and
external. We are the opposite of the angry young artist at this point
in our journey.

Yet, we are on course. More young
Arabs are studying literature seriously with the view to mastering the
skills of writing. This together with a greater readiness to examine
ourselves and enter the heap of history that lies all around us and to
move the dirt and paw through fragments, reclaim the little things, and
invent the rest.